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Neuhaus Symposium

With Neuhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut opens a temporary and transdisciplinary academy for more-than-human knowledge. The Neuhaus opening symposium on 18 May 2019 sets the tone of the academy by outlining the challenges and presenting the core themes, and thereby introduces the curriculum.

Neuhaus reacts to the current era's planetary burnout with a multifaceted curriculum in the spirit of the Bauhaus, which tried to re-imagine and recreate the world after the devastation of the First World War: to see and design the world anew through radical design and educational innovation.

Refocus to other subjectivities

Because the notion of progress has revolved for centuries around the specific needs and interests of some humans, the realities of almost all other bodies, species, creatures and ecosystems have been sidelined. Today’s ecological and sociopolitical crises are a direct consequence of this ethos and exclusionary mechanism.

Neuhaus argues that for the future of the planet, relationships between humans and between humans and non-humans should be transformed from the current, mostly exploitative dynamic into non-racist and non-species, non-extractive forms of coexistence. This means a radical refocusing of attention on other subjectivities. Humans need to understand that matter is the common ground of all beings and is much more than just latent material to satisfy individual humans’ needs. Humans must learn to take into account time spans and dimensions in which their own existence is not the only measure, and must learn to move with the help of collective bodies and intelligences, and learn to design from a form of embodied empathy.

The Neuhaus opening symposium brings together artists, designers, theorists, makers and more-than-human bodies who will set the tone of the academy by outlining the challenges and presenting the core themes, and thereby introduce the curriculum.

Inclusion

Neuhaus asks all attendees to commit to creating safer spaces. Spaces that make Neuhaus as accessible and comfortable as possible, and that foster compassionate action on ‘thinking the world anew’. Spaces where all bodies with different experiences and backgrounds feel not only included but centred. Our Code of Conduct sums up our common rules and responsibilities.

Photo: Dora Lionstone

Programme

10:00-10:30

Registration

10:30-10:45

Words of Welcome

10:45-11:00

Gerjan Piksen SOUND RITUAL

11:00-12:00

Federico Campagna TECHNIC AND MAGIC

Neuhaus aspires to create space to ‘reimagine the world’. Starting from this notion, Federico will explain that if we wish to reimagine our world, we first have to reimagine the idea of ‘reality’ that defines it. ‘We take for granted that only certain kind of things exist – electrons but not angels, passports but not nymphs. This is what we understand as ‘reality’. But in fact, ‘reality’ varies with each historical era of the world shaping what it is possible to do, think and imagine. Our contemporary age has embraced a troubling and painful form of reality: technic.’

12:00-13:00

Grâce Ndjako DECOLONISING THOUGHT AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

Our ways of living and learning are intertwined with our colonial past, and therefore permeated by a biased normative vision of humanism. As Neuhaus tries to decentre some humanisms, it also means to re-centre others and to refocus our attention on other important but less dominant humanities and histories.

In her lecture Grâce will take a critical look at European thought and the epistemologies it has produced, which have created ‘the other’. She will discuss African thinkers like Mogobe Ramose who works on decolonialising thought, as Frantz Fanon has called for in his “Les damnés de la terre”. These thinkers do the fundamental work of decolonising the notion of the human that has been presented to them for centuries.

13:00-14:30

LUNCH

Pick up your lunch bag between 13:00 and 14:30.

13:15-14:00

Cooking Sections THE EMPIRE REMAINS SHOP BOOK LAUNCH

Although never actually opened, ‘Empire Shops’ were developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, rum from Jamaica. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the implications of selling the remains of the British Empire in London today.

Based on a public installation that took place in the autumn of 2016, The Empire Remains Shop book catalogues the installation's critical program of discussions, performances and dinners. Structured as a franchise agreement, the project lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the shop would need to address in order to think through political counter structures for a better distributed, hyper-globalised world.

THE EMPIRE REMAINS SHOP is published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

13:15-14:00

Annika Kappner AQUARIAN GARDENS SOUNDWALK

The soundwalk invites you to explore the (bio) diversity and complexity of The New Garden through the sensorial; to engage with The New Garden through the body as a space to connect to the feminine qualities of receptivity and coexistence to access other, more-than-human, possibilities of knowing and being. With a short introduction by Annika.

13:15-14:00

Elisa Yvelin THE CONFERENCE OF THE LICHENS

Elisa invites you to a conversation that extends beyond species boundaries, a dialogue with lichens to learn about their spectacular capacity for collaboration and symbiosis, and their sustainable metabolism. The Conference of the Lichens is simultaneously a tea ceremony, exhibition, performance, dance and scientific conference.

13:45-14:15

Menno Schilthuizen DARWIN COMES TO TOWN TALK

We have entered a new chapter in the history of life, Menno says, a chapter in which much old biodiversity is, sadly, disappearing, but also one in which a new and exciting set of lifeforms is being born. Thanks to evolutionary adaptation taking place at unprecedented speeds, plants and animals are coming up with new ways of living in the seemingly hostile asphalt and steel environments that humans have created.

14:00-14:30

Evelina Domnitch, Dmitry Gelfand MEMORY VAPOUR INFUSION

Every second, Earth’s inhabitants are bombarded by billions of charge carriers, arriving from every possible direction in outer space. Through a nitrogen infusion ritual in their installation Memory Vapour, Evelina and Dmitry offer you a direct encounter with these subatomic messengers. As they traverse the supersaturated gas these cosmic rays macroscopically disclose their identity and the plenum underlying the empirical void. The immediacy of this experience allows you to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion.

14:00-15:00

Tabita joins us virtually to share an offering to restore our ability to connect. How do we connect? How does it feel? While eternity is on repeat, and anxiety on the rise, we keep scrolling into the void to escape our existential conditions. Under the guidance of the Bakongo cosmogram, this litany for connection travels around the four moments of the sun and envisions the revival of spiritual information technologies to supplement our Internet diet.

14:30-15:15

The Otolith Group ON RABINDRANATH TAGORE

A reading based on the research conducted by The Otolith Group into the contemporary legacy of Visva Bharati, the experimental art school founded in 1919 by polymath, poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Anjalika and Kodwo will show fragments of the film O Horizon, compiled from rare footage of art, craft, music and dance, that shows the material production of the school and its community. Tagores’ approach to didactics pays a lot of attention to connecting learner’s bodies and perception to their environment and the beings that live there.

O Horizon was commissioned by Bauhaus Imaginista and co-produced with the Rubin Museum, with the kind support of Project 88.

14:30-15:30

Menno Schilthuizen DARWIN COMES TO TOWN WALK

Following his talk earlier today Menno will guide an urban ecology walk that makes the insights from his book Darwin Comes to Town experiential.

14:30-15:30

Annika Kappner GUIDED MEDITATION LCFM II

A guided meditation by Annika invites the participants to explore the sensorial dimension related to our seemingly opposite desires for connection and control. Relating to Federico Campagna's work "Technic and Magic" the work looks at inner imagery related to contemporary fantasies of total control through technological advances and experiences of connection in non-linear, synaesthetic cultural practices.

14:45-15:30

Elisa Yvelin THE CONFERENCE OF THE LICHENS

Elisa invites you to a conversation that extends beyond species boundaries, a dialogue with lichens to learn about their spectacular capacity for collaboration and symbiosis, and their sustainable metabolism. The Conference of the Lichens is simultaneously a tea ceremony, exhibition, performance, dance and scientific conference.

15:30-16:30

Elaine Gan AGAINST PROGRESS AND APOCALYPSE: DIAGRAMS FOR NATURE CULTURES

Paying attention to the various time experiences in more-than-human socialities is increasingly important to understand the unruly epoch that has come to be known as the Anthropocene. This presentation will look at the art and science of diagramming as a creative-critical method for tracing relations between species, machines, and landscapes – or nature cultures, in short. The material draws on Gan’s fieldwork, interdisciplinary research and analysis, and collaborative experiments.

16:30-17:30

Patricia MacCormack THE FUTURE IN THE AGE OF THE APOCALYPSE

Ironically the announcement of the Anthropocene coincided with the naming of current times as the Apocalypse, which has already arrived. In her lecture, Patricia looks at the ways in which we are already apocalypse citizens – from the end of truth and the repudiation of material reality to the end of species and the conversion of much life to labour – and asks not ‘what now’ but ‘how now?’ How can we live more ethically? How can the end of the human (even the posthuman) mean the end of human privilege as that which assists in opening the world to all life and to the human apocalypse being the birth of the world through deep ecology?

17:30-18:00

Elfie Tromp CLOSING RITUAL

Echoes from the lectures and activities will be shared by poet and writer Elfie Tromp.

On and Off

The EmpressA sensory and aesthetic interpretation of Neuhaus through krumping.

De Beeldvormers DRAWING REFLECTIONSThe day will be registered by the Beeldvormers, two visual artists who capture in drawings what film or pictures can not reveal.

Raoul de Jong INFORMAL CONVERSATIONSWe have special listening ears with whom you can share your thoughts and feelings throughout the day. This conversationalist pays attention to all voices, making sure everyone is heard.

Plants & Animalia MORE-THAN-HUMAN SOUND BITESElectro-acoustic compositions based on sound phenomena produced by plants and animals connect the different parts of the programme.

Merle Bergers LINGUA PLANTAPlants attract, defend and repel with an astounding sense of inter-species connectivity and collaboration. The fragrant atmosphere in the auditorium is based on different plant languages that are interweaved with the human contributions to the symposium.

19:00-Late

NEUHAUS MULTISPECIES OPENING PARTY

Confirmed Speakers and Performers

participants (in alphabetical order)

Merle Bergers

Merle Bergers makes work that evokes empathy and connects people, micro-organisms and plants alike. Most of us feel a certain compulsion to give people and animals priority over greenery. Plants do not talk, they move too slowly for our eyes to see and do not seem to think and feel the same way humans do. The result is that we treat plants as decorative, inferior beings we have a hard time connecting with. But what if we could start to learn their language? Would that bring us closer? Lingua Planta is Merle’s graduation work on the possibilities of plant sentience. She studied at the department of man & food at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Federico Campagna

Federico Campagna is a philosopher and writer. Before moving to London in 2007 he spent more than twenty years in Milan, where he was active in the anarchist/autonomist networks and co-founded the street-poetry collective Eveline. In his latest work Technic and Magic Federico suggests an entirely new worldview and reintroduces non-Western mysticism and magic as an alternative way of shaping the world and life.

Cooking Sections

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics.

De Beeldvormers

De Beeldvormers is a collaboration of visual artists Machteld Aardse and Kyra Sacks. In their drawings they capture both the essence and less visible aspects of a story or situation. Through close observation and the quick translation of impressions onto paper, their combination of situational sketches, metaphors and text offer a unique medium which can be reflected upon and worked with afterwards by the audience.

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, the artists’ installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these rarely seen phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being mediated, they often serve to vastly extend the observer’s sensory envelope. Especially for Neuhaus they assembled a range of works that facilitate real-time meetings between humans and matter that make it palpable that matter is so much more than just latent material.

Elaine Gan

Elaine Gan is interested in mapping worlds otherwise. Her transdisciplinary practice combines methods from art, science, and digital/environmental humanities to study the timing and temporal coordinations of more-than-human socialities. Through writing, drawing, interactive media, and installation, Elaine explores historical materialisms and temporal coordinations that emerge between species, machines, and landscapes, with a particular interest in plants and fungi. Elaine teaches at New York University, Centre for Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (NYU Graduate School of Arts & Science), where she also leads the Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab.

Ruben Jacobs

Ruben Jacobs is a writer and sociologist. He teaches at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht. He is also a regular contributor to the online philosophy platform Brainwash.nl. His book Artonauten. Op expeditie in het Antropoceen was published in 2018 by V2_Publishing, Rotterdam. He wrote the essay ‘How Do We Get Home on this New Earth?’ that reflects upon some of the ideas behind and possible interpretations of Neuhaus.

Raoul de Jong

Raoul de Jong travelled around West Africa at the age of nineteen, survived four months in New York with fifty dollars in his pocket and walked from Rotterdam to Marseille in the name of his dog Puck. He writes columns, articles and published six books amongst which Life is horrific (2005) and Diary of an adolescent (2018). Together with writer Sanneke van Hassel, he wrote the reading performance In Suriname for Theater Rotterdam, based on his novel about Surinamese heroes that will be published in October 2019.

Annika Kappner

Annika Kappner is a visual artist working with a deconstruction of the sensorium to create glitches in perception. She is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary artist collective Elephants & Volcanoes. Her compositions combine elements from installation, sculpture, sound and performance art to explore alternative experiential perspectives to the contemporary relation between human, matter and fellow beings; a possible emancipation through sensing and feeling. Especially for Neuhaus she created a soundwalk to connect oneself to the surroundings of The New Garden and experience the hybrid, seemingly conflicting elements of the environment through the senses.

Patricia MacCormack

Patricia MacCormack is an interdisciplinary theorist and, among other things, a lecturer in continental philosophy, queer theory, posthumanist ethics and film sciences at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Patricia’s research is about queering as a vehicle that facilitates thinking ‘beyond man’ through art, ethics and nature, and to live together more empathically, as human and non-human beings.

Grâce Ndjako

Grâce Ndjako is a political scientist, philosopher and writer, as well as a teaching assistant in non-Western Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and lecturing in African and Afro-Caribbean Philosophy at the Black Renaissance Foundation. Grâce’s work includes tracing African philosophy, the daily lives of people of African descent, and the magic they represent.

Tabita Rezaire

Tabita Rezaire who is, in her own words, an 'incarnation of infinity', works as a video and performance artist, researcher, activist and yoga teacher in search of technologies for connection, healing and emancipation. Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of struggles, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Through screen interfaces and collective offerings, her digital healing and energy streams remind us to open up to our inner data centres - to download beyond western authority but from soul.

Menno Schilthuizen

Menno Schilthuizen is an evolutionary biologist and writer. He works as a senior researcher at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and is Professor of Biology at Leiden University. Menno questions the traditional distinction between nature and culture. In his latest book Darwin Comes to Town he shows us that evolution in cities can happen far more rapidly, and more strangely than Darwin had dared to dream.

Plants & Animalia

Plants & Animalia (Christina Ertl-Shirley alias C.E.S. and Felicity Mangan) explore the sound phenomena produced by plants and animals. Using synthesizers and samplers, they they create electro-acoustic compositions combining modified field recordings of animal voices with the sonic impulses of biochemical processes of plants thus creating virtually bio-acoustical environments.

Squirrel Nation

Squirrel Nation (Erinma Ochu and Caroline Ward) are an art-design studio who consider co-existence as an ethic, leading with intersectional, ecological practices spanning installation, moving image and event curation in a range of settings. Their research-orientated practice tunes into the harmonies, tensions and contradictions at the boundaries of nature, geobiology and technology to cultivate culture through different voices and spaces. Squirrel Nation were artists in residence with The Stuart Hall Library/Iniva and Jerwood Fellows at Manchester International Festival.The moderation of Neuhaus Symposium is undertaken by Squirrel Nation.

The Empress

The Empress (a.k.a. Aissa Traore) is an actress and krump dancer. She participates in krump competitions and has travelled to compete in battles and gain more krump knowledge. She thrives to stay feminine in a male-dominated arena: ‘My delicacy and confidence translates into strength when I dance, which I believe can be understood by men and women alike.’

The Otolith Group

The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) is an artistic and curatorial duo, occasionally expanded with fellow researchers and (visual) essayists. In their work they explore, among other things, the complex environmental issues of the present time, the different experiences and speeds of time, the mutual alienation of human, inhuman and more-than-human actors and the way in which aesthetics, (geo)politics and the course of history are interrelated. From 25 May until 18 August, the Van Abbemuseum will present Xenogenesis, the first large-scale exhibition by The Otolith Group in The Netherlands.

Elfie Tromp

Elfie Tromp is a writer and columnist. Underdog, her second novel, has been nominated for the BNG Literature and Diorapthe prizes. She is an opinion maker for De Nieuws BV and a regular presenter on the VPRO radio programme Nooit Meer Slapen. In 2018 she published her poetry debut Victorieverdriet, a travelogue through the landscape of mourning and loneliness to eventually come to a new, more vulnerable connection with the world.

Elisa Yvelin

Elisa Yvelin works with performance and dance. Her research led her to look for translation frames to host channelling phenomena. She studied energetic practices, Reiki, Kundalini, auto-hypnosis and phenomenology. Within the context of the Neuhaus Symposium she takes on the role of mediator between lichens and the symbiotic organisms that humans consist of. Originally from France, she is based in Brussels, where she graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in 2010.